Liberia

NEW SCIENTIST  Opinion                                   May 6, 2015

...HOW the world has changed. In 1948, the first commercial jet airliner was still a few years away from take-off, and the global population was just over 2 billion. Less than one-third lived in cities. Back then, safeguarding global health seemed an eminently manageable project. The newly formed United Nations agreed, and established the World Health Organization.

 Now, over half the planet's 7 billion people are packed into urban areas. Between us, we travel tens of billions of kilometres around the globe every year, with plenty of pathogens and parasites coming along for the ride. The WHO, largely unchanged since its creation, is ill-equipped to deal with the disease threats that this new world creates.

The recent Ebola outbreak is a case in point. Even the WHO's director-general, Margaret Chan, said her organisation was "overwhelmed" and admitted that a crisis on that scale "cannot be solved by a single agency".

LIVESCIENCE  by Rachel Rettner                                                          May 6, 2015

The Ebola virus can live on surfaces in hospitals for nearly two weeks, a new study suggests.

Researchers tested how long the Ebola virus could survive on plastic, stainless steel and Tyvek, a material used in Ebola suits. The researchers also simulated different environmental conditions, including a climate-controlled hospital at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) and 40 percent humidity, and the typical environment of West Africa, at 80 F (27 C) and 80 percent humidity.

In general, the virus survived on surfaces for a longer time when in the climate-controlled conditions than in the West African environment, the study found. Under hospital-like conditions, the virus lived for 11 days on Tyvek, eight days on plastic and four days on stainless steel. The longest the virus was able to survive in the tropical conditions of the West African environment was three days, on Tyvek.

Read complete story.

http://www.livescience.com/50758-ebola-virus-survival-surfaces.html

Now the threat from Ebola seems to be receding, rich countries must not revert to their former myopia. Listening to other countries’ needs and investing in women and children would be a start

THE GUARDIAN Commentary  by Chelsea Clinton and Devi Sridar                May 6, 2015

Amnesia has set in across the world as the fear and global attention given to Ebolarecedes. But this is not a new phenomenon. With Sars, avian flu, swine flu and Mers, there were repeated calls to fix the global health system to avoid previous mistakes. We cannot continue to be surprised when a health crisis emerges and we need to start to take a long-term, inclusive perspective to ensure health security across the world. Myopia was a key factor in the failure to respond to Ebola in a rapid and effective way.

There are three immediate steps that should be taken:

Read complete article.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/06/ebola-global-health-priorities-chelsea-clinton

CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION by Moneeza Walji                                    Mayl 4, 2015
The call to action for the Ebola outbreak extended far and wide, with the epidemic now having more than 26 000 cases and claiming more than 10 000 lives, but the response has raised questions about underlying problems that hinder health care in some countries and about who was best positioned to respond.

At a recent session of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health in Boston, Dr. Peter Piot, one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus, said the outbreak and crisis in West Africa "has revealed major fault lines in the local societies and in the international system; in how we conduct research and how we develop new drugs and vaccines and also in trust and the way that international aid and development and cooperation is operating."